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Facebook and Twitter are portrayed as the arch nemeses of Google, when in reality, these new social forces will save Google's search engine by allowing its results to become exponentially better. It will restore everything the Internet was meant to be--a democracy.

The Internet lacks democracy.

As an SEO and small business advocate and owner, my primary complaint about search engines is that they are terribly non-democratic. Search engines, like Google, confuse democracy with authority. They believe links mean votes, indicating authority, and votes elect the highest ranking pages in the search results. From my viewpoint as an online user and SEO, this is horribly flawed.

What I like most about democracy, on the other hand, is that for the most part, the "thing" that is liked by most people wins. "Liked" could be viewed as most insightful, most entertaining, most creative, most inspiring, or most anything. The success level of democracy is directly determined by the number of people that can participate in it. As any statistician knows, the more people that take part in a study or survey, the more useful, beneficial, and accurate the results become. A huge sample is a sure sign of what is most liked. It clearly identifies the winner.

The Internet thrives while online democracy suffers.

The web continues to grow furiously. It's not too surprising that the number of people who read web content continue to outnumber the people who create it. These online creators, the writers of web content, are gatekeepers who continue to become more powerful on the web as their influence reaches out to more consumers. Why are these gatekeepers so powerful? One word: links. It is not power they have stolen. It is the power that search engines have granted them. In order to "vote" for a page, you need to link to it. This means only providers of online content can create links. It also means that only providers of online content have a vote.

For the majority of internet users who use the internet to seek insight, entertainment, creative ideas, inspiration, among other things, are merely sitting on the sidelines, watching countless elections take place without a ballot in what could be considered one of the most important "democracies" on the planet – the internet. End users who strictly consume the content are powerless to influence search engine rankings and have little to no say as to what they like best. Sure, the Google algorithm is mighty complicated with all kinds of factors that influence search rankings including speculation that bounce rates and time on page data indirectly gives power to the end user, but let's be real here. Links have exponentially more power than any other element in the equation.

Social Media is here to build democracy.

The trend for how we would define "social media" now really started many years ago. Amazon led the way with the review revolution. All products could be reviewed and people's voices were suddenly heard. People could vote for the products and services and opinions they liked. They didn't even need a website. They didn't need to link. Huh, what a concept.

Review forums popped up everywhere and informational and business listings also included review and rating systems. Content suppliers saw how powerful it was to give everyday consumers a voice. People love to share their opinion. We all know this. Blogs become popular and comments created more ways to voice opinions about topics of all kinds. The internet was becoming more, [gulp] "interactive." The problem was that even though it was interactive, voices of consumers would influence conversations on a given web page, but they still could not cast a vote to the overall significance of the page to search engines. Web users simply could not affect the ranking of the page on search results.

And then came Facebook. We all know what happened next. It changed the way we share information. It continues to grow incredibly fast not only because it is a great way to connect with long lost friends, but because in some situations, it is a better and more reliable way to obtain information than from search engines. People like qualified advice from people they know. Google noticed.

A change of power is happening slowly, right in front of our eyes. The sample of people from which votes are collected is now growing exponentially. This larger sample means more accuracy and confidence. It means a more democratic online world. Users of Facebook and Twitter can vote for content they like in a simple click. Everyday users tell search engines about valuable content. No website links are needed. No gatekeeper status is necessary. It's beautiful.

Everyone should be thankful. Especially Google.

We should all thank Facebook and Twitter, among other social media leaders, for giving many more online users a voice for what pages should be at the top of search results pages through their respective social media power tools. Doesn't it just make sense that consumers should determine the best pages, and not just the gatekeepers? The social trend has even pushed Google to come up with its very own social feedback button we all have probably heard by now, the Google +1 vote.

Those in SEO and search marketing should be thrilled that the time will come where we don't have to spend every waking hour figuring out how to build links with our white hats, grey hats, and black hats. Instead, we can focus on content that everyone can vote for, not just gatekeepers.

Facebook is often seen as Google's new nemesis. Ironically, Google should be most grateful since it will improve their search engine results immensely and ensure their continued dominance, so long as they can leverage the social data (the real democratic vote) the right way in their magical algorithm.

Social media has opened the door to millions of new voters with ballots in hand. Finally, these votes will count to determine what websites and web pages people like best. Don't be surprised if search engine results pages start showing higher quality websites soon. After all, democracy put them there courtesy of social media.

What do you think? Do you see social media impacting the future online world as much as I do? Please leave your thoughts below.

About Kyle Neuberger —
Kyle is the Online Marketing Strategist at Firespring. You can read all his latest articles at www.blog.firespring.com/author/kyle-neuberger/

Comments
25

Facebook, Twitter and all the other social network (Google+ included) will never build democracy until they have shares in a stock market or someone able to close down any account in less then 2 seconds.

Facebook can build democracy until you respect their guidelines (decided during several meeting, not during years like the laws of our "in real life" democracy), same goes for Twitter and Google.

This huge corporations (we are talking about corporations, keep that in mind) can develop democracy as long as they can develop more income, ROI and revenue, that's it!

If you want democracy then we should talk about all the open source software that are trying to replicate this social network such as http://identi.ca/, a service like twitter where every user can install his server and host his own data.

Democracy online in nowadays means that I'm the owner of my(personal) data, not a corporation in Palo Alto or Mountain View.

I can agree on you ONLY if we are talking about "consumers" democracy, but not Democracy (with the capital "D").

My definition of "democracy" was an attempt to follow its literal definition (taken from Dictionary.com):

"government by the people; a form of government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised directly by them or by their elected agents under a free electoral system."My main point is that social media platforms provide an open electoral system which can influence search engine rankings, thus, giving ranking power to the people.

It's true that using the social media we can "vote" (or "like" or "+1" or "retweet"), but the system itself (Facebook, twitter, google+) is not "neutral", we can get banned (or closed, or penalized) any time without even a warning, this is my concern.

I do understand your point about social platforms being "neutral" in that they can shut down your account. That is, however, no different from Google or other search engines banning your site. Rules and laws are part of the world we live in, and the internet is no exception.

I'm not claiming utopia on the web or for search engines, I'm just saying social media should help us get more participants and one step closer to democracy on the web.

I *love* the idea of social as the place where a type of democracy can thrive, but I'm not sure how well most business models and true democracy can exisit together.

How would you factor in Facebook's algorthium which sorts data based on what it thinks you will be interested in? Facebook is still assume the same type of authority that Google is on what it deems relevant. What about minority viewpoints? (We only have to look at history to see examples of horrible things humankind did that were "acceptable" during their times, and there are certainly things happening now which one day history will scorn us for.)

Then look at an unfiltered stream like a Twitter feed where Kim Kardashian has been trending for over a day now. Does it make that top news because people are interested in it? The majority seems to have declared it news.

What about the social bubble when Twitter recomends me to follow people with similar world-views to my own? (I only think that Facebook is slightly better than this if only because it tries to make me connect with everyone I've known in my entire life, which life is far more random.) How do we widen the bubble to take in views that aren't exactly like our own?

Anyway, thanks for making an interesting post that gave me lots to think about. I do think social gives us a great start, but it's still a work-in-progress.

Thanks Kyle, for the useful discussion between the "Democracy" and "Authority" in the world of internet. I agree to your fact that Google and many other search engines should be thankful to the social medias cuz these social medias add lots of weightage in making the democratic values in other words they make the popularity about a particualr content.

I read about Google's patent in the blog of Bill slawski(seobythesea blog), according to his post, although the democracy/popularity is much helpful in making the content searches more useful compared to calculating the authority values(which many search engines might adopt) ,the democracy/popularity e.g. "likes" may not be enough to give the accurate results.

E.g. If a scientist(He has just his single online journal page) invents some concepts but he is not in FB ,on the other hand the same concept is made more analyzed and deeply researched by some Big organization like CERN(which has many direct and indirect pages in social media sites) will get more visibility than the online journal of the scientist in internet!

While indeed thought provoking, I was imediatly thinking alonf these lines. Some of the most important things on the internet (Scientific refrences e.t.c) are not the kind of thing that routeenly go viral. In fact for these kind of documents, the current system makes more sense, as it's much more likly to get authoritive links then social likes.

Very true. Social media acts as a good supplement (not replacement) to how the current search engines/ranking factors works.

Social influences to rankings only make sense in specific instances. This fact, in my view, brings more variance to search engine ingredients, more fairly ranking pages since there's more influencers involved via social media.

Social media should never trump all of the other ingredients used for rankings. However, it should be part of the mix.

An interesting write up, but I'm with the people who disagree. Social media is hurting SEO more than it's helping:

People link to each other's social profiles more than their websites (reducing number of potential backlinks)

Increasing use of Facebook commenting on external websites reduces places you can include your URL

Social sharing buttons and plugins slow sites down

Rankings can favour people's social profiles above their own personal websites

People often like/comment posts on Facebook rather than heading to the original source of the article and taking the discussion (including visits, clicks to other articles & potential backlinks) there.

Increased bounce rates from things like StumbleUpon and Twitter links - people often only read the one article they've been linked to.

Highly popular Twitter users (e.g. SmashingMag) frequently take whole sites down by linking to a single page in a tweet.

I take Google largely at their word when they tell me they want to organize all the world's information and make it more useful to me. (There's also the flabbergasting advertising revenues and profits. Call that added value.) Why wouldn't they welcome another powerful signal to incorporate into their search algorithm?

And as you rightly point out, this isn't a signal which can be broadcast only by content producers and publishers. What gets linked to, how and how often, by whom, etc. is all great information, but it's not the whole story. Social signals can help scale the engines going forward -- as in vastly increase what data they can crunch in order to identify what's relevant and authoritative, useful, interesting and so on. My dad can 'Like' something on Facebook or leave a review somewhere, and that matters now in a way that it previously didn't. Where you expand the pool of people and/or opinions/votes that matter, you increase the democratic nature of what rises to the top of the SERPs, don't you think? Google would be nuts not to work hard on gathering this data and using it to make their product better.

I wouldn't consider them the enemy of Google as they almost rely on eachother. I do think Facebook is now less worried about Google then Google is of Facebook. Facebook could flip the switch and become a search engine like that.

About democrazy... Would we really want the Gov controlling Facebook or any site out there?

Hi, I agree with some of your points, I work on numerous social ampaigns for large business. I think that one big consideration is that the bigger you are on social media the more power you have. It just places a strong emphasis on business to have a good social presence yet small business is usually more concerned with keeping staff over having a social presence you just need to change the mind set of the market.

Another thing is that Facebook/ Twitter/ Google seem to all want to keep the data for them selves.

I believe that Google sees Facebook as a threat more so than any other social platform or search engine for that matter. Google's cash comes from AdWords, almost exclusively, and Facebook is taking small chunks out of it bite by bite. Imagine if, hypothetically, if people reffered solely to Facebook friends for product decision, what would be the point of AdWords? None. People are logging more and more time on Facebook and their advertising platform seems quite robuts(the effectiveness of Social Ads remains to be seen IMO) so Google has every right to worry about Facebook. They are eating their bread and butter.

Social media influence seems apparent and the crew at seomoz have done some really interesting research about correlation data as it relates to rankings, especially as it pertains to Facebook. Useful articles below:

I completely disagree with 99% of your article. End users of the internet are very, very powerful because of a couple of things:

- they can vote with their mouse. no click means no vote. A bounce is a vote.- they can vote with their browsers. Clicking the back button is a bounce, and that's a vote.- end users can create more links on their own digital assets than content creators ever will. Why? Because there are more end users than content creators

End users have their voice in the democracy of the internet. If search engines would ignore the voice of end users they would go bankrupt. I'm 100% sure on this.